Using alternate layouts with Twixl Publisher 3

With Twixl Publisher 3 and InDesign CS6, you can take advantage of the liquid layout/alternate layout options that Adobe introduced in this version. When using alternate layouts, we recommend starting your design based on a single layout format, e.g. iPad landscape.

How to get started

Start by creating a new publication and make sure Use Liquid and Alternate Layout is checked in the publication properties dialog. Note that if you select this option, you cannot select the traditional Portrait and Landscape orientations that used to generate 2 documents in InDesign CS5 and 5.5. With CS6, your alternate layouts will be stored within the document itself.

Define liquid layout rules

You can now add articles to your publication, and define the liquid layout options for the objects on each of your pages. For more information about the use of liquid layout, please refer to Adobe's documentation or video tutorials.

Generate alternate layouts

Once your design is more or less complete for the form factor you designed first, the Alternate Layouts  option in the main view of the plug-in allows you to generate different versions for all your articles automatically. We suggest to first create an iPad portrait version, based on the iPad landscape you created, and to make the necessary changes to that layout.
Once you are satisfied with how the alternate layout looks, you can then use the plug-in to automatically generate Android landscape and portrait versions. If you have created both an iPad landscape and portrait version before generating the Android version, you get the advantage that the Android landscape will be based on the iPad landscape, and the Android portrait on the iPad portrait version. In a single click, the plug-in will detect which articles already have alternate layouts defined, and will only offer to add them only to those documents where they are not yet available.

If you have the 'Link Stories' option checked, you will be able to easily keep text blocks across the different alternate layouts in sync.

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